2024 NEAR Year In Review

2024 was a great year for NEAR – we saw major growth across all metrics, welcomed the return of NEAR.AI, and progressed towards Web3 truly multichain with Chain Abstraction. Thank you for all your support and feedback throughout the year! Here’s a recap of everything our teams accomplished and a look ahead at what we’ll work on in 2025.

Major Growth Across All Metrics & Notable Launches:

NEAR is a top protocol for real-world apps with millions of users and is the top L1 by user retention. To this day, the NEAR network has never experienced an outage, even during major updates to the protocol which happen live. Here are some growth highlights (with numbers from Dune and Artemis):

• 40 million monthly active users, up from 7 million this time last year
• 4 million daily active users, up 4x this year
• 8+ million daily transactions, doubled from the start of the year (with average fee at $0.002)
• 4 of the top apps in all of Web3 by monthly active users:
  • KAIKAI: 31.7 million MAU
  • HOT Wallet: 4.2 million MAU
  • SWEAT: 1.6 million MAU
  • Playember: 500k MAU
• $700 million in stablecoins flowed into the NEAR ecosystem, a 20x increase YoY
• New ATH in natively issued stablecoins in May at $760 million, with a 5x increase in DeFi TVL from $88 million to $430 million
• NEAR ecosystem teams raised $146 million in external capital in 2024
• Nightshade 2.0: NEAR now has 6 shards live, a 50% capacity increase over the start of the year (and soon to be 8 shards in Q1). The protocol working group shipped Nightshade 2.0 sharding, marking the biggest protocol upgrade since mainnet launched in 2020 and introducing Stateless Validation.
• Accelerators: the Foundation ran 3 successful accelerator cohorts, 2 for AI and one for Chain Abstraction, whose participating teams raised $50.5 million in funding
• ETH wallet compatibility: NEAR is now fully compatible with MetaMask, Phantom, and other ETH wallets
• Hosted [REDACTED]: our annual flagship conference moved to Bangkok this year, with 1200 attendees, 1600 hackers, and 6300+ transactions on the conference app

NEAR is the Blockchain for AI 

The entire internet is experiencing a paradigm shift towards AI + blockchain, and NEAR is uniquely positioned to lead this AI-first future. We must ensure that AI is truly open source and shared by all rather than controlled by a few mega-powerful corporations. It also must preserve users’ privacy and sovereignty and should be free to use, yet monetizable and sustainable for its builders and developers.

• In May, the NEAR Foundation announced that it would focus on User-Owned AI with co-founder Alex Skidanov leading R&D. 
• At [REDACTED] in November, we launched NEAR AI in Alpha with app.near.ai, a research hub building a 1.4T parameters model in a fully open way, and chat.near.ai, a user-owned AI assistant that can act on the user’s behalf in both Web2 and Web3 by connecting with other AI agents and services.
• The NEAR AI ecosystem now includes more than 50 top AI teams across research, infrastructure, data & storage, models, and applications. 

A key part of the vision for AI is about abstracting specific blockchain elements away from user experiences to improve accessibility and ease of use. Users will interact primarily with agent-driven interfaces across the entire Web; Chain Abstraction enables agents to seamlessly deliver a range of finance, commerce, and degen types of experiences on the user’s behalf. Some highlights from 2024 now making this possible:

• Chain Signatures: enable smart contracts to sign transactions on any blockchain. Live across mainnets for chains using ECDSA, with EdDSA coming soon.
• Intents: a new transaction type on NEAR allowing information, requests, assets, and actions to be exchanged between AI agents, services, and end users. Intents let agents interact with each other and complete actions across Web2 and Web3, which forms the basis for the next generation of the internet. Demo Intents app is here.
• Infinex partnership: Infinex, founded by Synthetix creator Kain Warwick, aims to abstract away UX challenges and complexities at the core of DeFi. Integrating Chain Signatures and NEAR Intents will bring Infinex closer to feature parity with centralized exchanges.

What’s Next?

We will be full speed ahead in January: building an ecosystem for autonomous agents, enabling agentic commerce, developing TEE infra for verifiably private inference, and hosting monetizable models. The momentum is already starting: check out Eliza running multichain swaps on @ai16zdao using NEAR intents. NEAR AI and Frax are teaming up to build truly autonomous agents using NEAR infra. And SWEAT is integrating AI assistant into their wallet UI.

2025 is the year of Blockchain for AI. We believe this focus for NEAR is the best way to ensure the future internet is owned by more than a few companies and supports sovereignty for users. We will make sure everything we do levels up to this mission and helping founders and builders understand why they want and need to be a part of it.

Thanks to everyone in the NEAR community for your work and commitment this year. –Illia